HubSpot Ideas

katiebroyles

Merged Record History

Recently I recognized a problem with merging records, specifically with contacts. We had a contact that had been duplicated because they used a different email, but the same phone # and name, however, they were not assigned to the same contact owner.  That's when one of our sales team members decided to merge the contacts together, despite that based on our internal rules (if the contact had never closed a deal in the last 2+ months, they're open game, if a contact does have a closed deal, they can't be touched until 6 months after that and if the current owner hasn't followed up), the contact should still have been assigned to the other sales person.

 

In simple, person A was assigned the duplicate record, saw that they were duplicated with person B's contact who B had been talking to. Person A merged the two contacts and took ownership of the merged record and didn't follow our rules.

 

When a sales manager was alerted of this, they came to me to try and see how this could have  been avoided, or if we could have prevented this from happening, and we came up with two solutions that would be helpful:

  1. Being able to view the previously merged data
    1. For example, when reviewing potential duplicates, you can set certain properties that can be used to check against the potential duplicate records, having this be a potential viewing option would help sales managers follow up on merged records and help resolve contact ownership disputes
    2. Here is an example of what we check when reviewing duplicates. We want to identify who has the most sales activities, who spoke to the contact the longest time ago, and if two records are super close, I will then review the associated deals attached to the records and see which one closed most recently before determining which contact is the most correct one to act as the primary details for the merged record
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      2. In the situation listed above, I'd see that the record on the left has more activities plus a more recent activity date, since both records upon further inspection do not have an associated deal tied to their records, I'd keep the contact associated to the one that has had the most recent back and forth interaction (an email responded to, or a call that had been answered) which was the one on the left.
  2. Set merging records as a permission rather than something anyone can do
    1. While I typically trust our team to merge correctly, this is one of those situations where they didn't know the best procedure in this situation. What we could have done to prevent this is to set permissions for the sales team managers and marketing team members to be the only ones allowed to merge different record types.
      1. Example: had the user been unable to merge the record, they would have reached out to their direct manager or a marketing manager to assess the situation, rather than merging before checking record details

I think these would be two simple ideas to implement to help prevent confusion for a contact, as well as give pause to merging a record before reviewing the necessary details.

6 Replies
MMurra
Member

Being able to pick what information to keep from either record would be fantastic as well!

FrederikLindum
Participant

I agree with this. I have the same issue when merging duplicate Companies - something we, due to several reason I wont bother you with, have too much of. I would asume 10 - 20% of our Companies are duplicates. 

 

The issue arises when different teams and employees work on different Companies, because they look to be the right one, and they add Tickets, Contacts, Deals, etc. and also update the Properties on the Company. When I find these and I want to merge the two Companies, I'm not able to choose what to merge from duplicate Company to the right one: It merges all associations and activities, which is fine, but it also updates the Company Property with the value of that Company with the latest updated field, and because the duplicate Company can have several Properties updated after the original Company had the same Property updated, we then get corrup data from the duplicate Company on the right Company, and when having billing information and internal IDs to other systems we've integrated Hubspot with (i.e. Netsuite), we corrupt not only the data on the Company (the Properties) we also corrupt the integration with other curcial systems, which in the worst case, makes it so that we are not able to invoice customers or that the send out invoices to the wrong address or addressee. 

 

I would like to be able to choose what data from the duplicate Company (or any other Object) I would like to be added to the right one, and then just deleting the rest. On my part that would look like this: 

  1. Choose the duplicate Company that I want to merge to the right Company
  2. Choose what to merge, i.e Contacts, Tickets, Deals and Attachments. 
  3. Merge an done

I've created my own thread on this here I would appreciate an upvote. 

GYoder
Participant

We are having the same issues. Looking at membership numbers. If a customer has been issued a duplicate number, the old number is Archived and the new number is Active. 

The system always deferrs to the Archived number when merging and that is pretty much useless information. 

Em111
Participant

I agree with Mmura.

 

"Being able to pick what information to keep from either record would be fantastic as well!" I said similar with one of our business examples on one of the other merge threads but Mmura has said it in a shorter and easier-to-understand way.

 

The easiest solution would be the option to choose which of the 2 records you want to keep the values for, but then be able to select any specific properties where you want the other record's value to stay/take over. For example if I had contact 1 who is a customer and contact 2 who is other, I'd like to be able to select lifecycle stage from the property list and choose to keep contact 1's value. I wouldn't want the merged contact to become Other and then have to reset it to Customer as that impact's our reporting and shows that contact 1 has become a customer when in fact they were already a customer from a previous month.

 

Another thing I noticed, with existing contacts who reach out as a one-off with a different email address (often their personal one), is that I really just want to be able to add that email address to their main record and it moves their activity log (any email, task, notes, calls) over. I know this is the purpose of merging, but most of the contact property info related to that email address is usually unneccessary/not useful, so it's only really the logged/tracked activities that I want to keep but just re-associated with the contact record that has all their primary/useful information.

 

PPlant4
Contributor

Would LOOOOVE the ability to see information prior to the merge. Like a snapshot of what was on the previous record, even if only stored for 30 days post merge would be helpful to see the name and deal stage or lead status prior to the merge. 

CapnKorb
Participant

I couldn't agree with this more. 

A third option that could help with mass merges would be to introduce a new data field as well called "Merge Date". This could track the date and time that contacts were merged, which would at the very least would help figure out what general time a group of contacts were merged so that groups of contacts that were merged improperly could be identified and hopefully at the very least primary email address and primary company can be switched, if needed.